Party on, Murakami!
Humble personal writing study of 5 famous authors.
Over the past few years I’ve watch a TON of writing videos on YOUTUBE. Do they really help us improve, I’m not sure. But from time to time someone does a DEEP DIVE on a particular author and I make scattered notes while listening.
Bellow are condensed versions of the notes I have, highly subjective, woefully unsatisfactory, but they’re my way of creating a road map to improvement.
I hope the information helps you, too. May you take more confident steps on your won writing journey.
1. Haruki Murakami:
Absurd, isolation, and symbolism
Vibe: Protagonists often drift through life, caught in a state of low-key existential dissociation.
Characters aren’t going anywhere in particular, music is abstract, and sciences feels dreamlike. Details evoke loneliness and surreal quiet between action and thought.
Techniques:
Minimal, clear language with slightly offbeat metaphors (“like a crowbar through Jell-O”).
Internal monologue that blurs reality and reflection.
An uncanny relationship to time.
Jack Kerouac:
Rhythmic Stream of Consciousness
Vibe: music-influenced, fast-moving prose with a feeling breathless momentum.
Sentence rhythm flow uninterrupted, with spontaneous associations
Techniques:
Long, tumbling sentences with internal rhymes or rhythm.
A sense of motion, even when the character is doing nothing.
Words chosen for their sound and feel as much as their meaning.
3. David Foster Wallace:
Hyperawareness, Irony, and Overload
Vibe: He notices everything and digs deep into mundane things with a kind of compulsive, almost neurotic intensity.
Techniques:
Micro-observation of events, described with unusual precision.
Irony and absurdity used to probe seriousness (“entire relationships built on smaller misunderstandings”).
Philosophical sidesteps built into the narrative.
Stephen King:
Everyday Made Terrifying
“What if your house, your car, your toaster—all had teeth?”
Vibe:
Monsters wait for their victims in basements, cornfields, school gyms, and childhood memories. Life feels normal until its not.
King sets stories in a small town where people know everyone’s job, vice, and nickname. Then introduces a presence that turns familiarity into paranoia.
He balances gore with empathy, terror with tenderness. His characters often know they’re not heroic, and that makes them more believable when they try to be.
Techniques used:
Character insights: Trauma, addiction, and memory define most protagonists.
Time: Dual timelines, flashbacks, and adult vs. child perspectives.
Ordinary objects become sinister: Think of a drain, a typewriter, a fog.
Not an author but I’d love to replicate his style in my won work.
Akira Kurosawa:
Emotion of a Storm - Ethics in crisis
“What is right when everything around you is wrong?”
Vibe:
Rain lashes, wind howls, and stillness becomes explosive. He captures both the physical and internal in motion.
Techniques used:
Weather as emotion: Rain = despair or cleansing. Wind = confrontation.
Multi-perspective truth: What happened depends on who you ask.
Visual rhythm: Characters move like choreography. A body turning, a pause, a slow draw of the sword. Timing is meaning.
Moral focus: His stories ask not just what happened, but who are you in the face of it?
Love your notes. My favorite about Murakami, David Foster Wallace - so sad about the end of this interrupted genius, and Akira Kurosawa, loved his movies, did he also commit suicide, or am I mistaken?
I'm a fan of the everyday made terrifying. Lovecraft did that too.